Versatile monitoring solutions
The goal of Monitor Scout is to provide a comprehensive monitoring infrastructure that covers as many monitoring use cases as possible. To this end we supply a number of different monitoring techniques along with a global monitoring network.
Active Monitoring
Monitor Scouts active monitors allow you to monitor a large number of external services. This includes monitoring of many standardised services like websites (HTTP), FTP, custom TCP ports and more.
Each active monitor lets you select the type of service you wish to monitor from a large selection of pre-defined monitors.
Many monitor types also take take additional parameters for improved user customization.
Monitor Locations
Active monitors let you select precisely which locations to use to perform the monitoring. The free Monitor Scout package includes 5 monitoring locations while the premium package includes 25 locations.
Select monitoring locations.
And view monitoring data for each selected location.
Graphs
A number of different graphs are provided for active monitors.
Response time graphs are used to display response times for the monitor, both averages and from each monitoring location.
Uptime graphs can be displayed to visualize uptime for different monitors.
Passive Monitoring
Monitor Scouts passive monitors are used to monitor services that can't be monitored by regular active monitors, either because they are unavailable from the Monitor Scout monitoring network or because there is no monitoring type that can be used to monitor the service.
Passive monitors receive monitoring data (reports) from external services using the Monitor Scout webservice API. This means that a script/program can be created that performs whatever monitoring actions are necessary, and then reports the result to a passive monitor.
Timeouts can be set so that an alert if generated if no report is received within a certain time interval. This means that you will be notified if the script/program feeding the passive monitor stops working.
Passive monitors come in a number of different flavors, boolean monitors tracking a up/down state, and a number of different numerical monitors which can trigger alerts on threshold over/under-runs.
Sending reports to a passive monitor using the Monitor Scout API is done with a simple HTTP request.
Component Monitoring
Component monitoring in Monitor Scout is used to monitor system components like CPU, memory, load - and also application metrics from for example apache (web server), MySQL etc.
Component monitoring can be enabled in two ways.
- SNMP monitoring Provides basic system data, CPU, memory, filesystems, network interfaces and process lists.
- HLReporter reporting client Monitor Scouts own reporting client. HLReporter provides a superset of the data the SNMP monitor provides and also includes data collection for a number of common applications.
HLReporter CPU monitoring gives data for a number of different usage classes.
HLReporter also collects and graphs data for applications like the Apache webserver.
As well as graphing the collected data it is also possible to set monitors on all collected metrics. Metric monitors allow you to set both max/min thresholds, and also to define how long a metric may exceed the given threshold before an alert is generated.
HLReporter and SNMP monitoring also enable the use of process monitoring. Complete process lists are available for each device.
Alerts
Monitor Scout allows alerts to be sent as either email or sms messages. Alert sending is configurable per user, providing both per user recipient addresses and alert schedules.
Monitor Scout includes an advanced alert manager which provides features such as:
- Alert acknowledgement Alert acknowledgement is used to indicate that an alert is being dealt with. Acknowledged alerts also stop sending notifications.
- Scheduled downtime Devices/monitors can have alert schedules that indicate when it is ok for a monitor to alert.
- Alert notes Notes can be attached to alerts to aid in tracking alert progress.
- Extensive alert history Alert histories are available on a per organisation, device and monitor basis.
